(en español después) If you have ever watched a professional snooker tournament, you come to a realization about those who are best at the game know how to play shape. While they are capable of making the impressive difficult shot, they only do so when a prior miscalculation has left them in a an impossible position. No great pool player would ever put themselves in a position where they had to make a difficult shot every time. They play shape, so that they can make it look relatively easy as they rack up points and victory.

In public education our formidable opponent is ignorance and it behooves us to also play shape, so that we can best use our limited resources in a manner that gets the best return on our investment. Sadly, what we have done up until now is set up a system of public education that makes it even more difficult, if not impossible, for educators to achieve success as the rule and not the exception. The hostile school work environment and apathy that infects all levels of public school function plays all of us that are involved against each other.

Instead of seeing how we can work together in coordinating our skills to pragmatically address our students needs and our own, we have created a system where neither the student nor the educator is getting what they need. In this unsustainable stress-filled environment with an incredibly high and unappreciated expensive burnout rate. We have come to view each other as enemies, instead of the colleagues we need to succeed, while leaving enough left of ourselves to have a serene life out of teaching from which we could draw the strength necessary to do what we need to do as educators. In brief, we are all running on empty.

Nobody is having a good time in public education and worst of all in talking with educators one constantly hears that teachers and administrators don't even see that having a good time is possibility - "What are you crazy?" When I say good time, I do not wish to imply that good teaching and administration in a public school system will ever be easy, but like in other difficult professions there should be at least a belief that satisfaction for a job well done is within the realm of that which is possible.

What is most irrational about the longstanding predicament we find ourselves in with public education where the clear majority of administrators, teachers, and students are not being asked to do a sustainable job given the reality they face. Rather, they simply go through the motions while sustaining an unacceptable level of physical and mental stress. We could rather easily turn it around if we didn't have such a strong aversion to change fed by our fears that we would somehow be worse off if we tried to fix a public education system that is coming up short for everyone involved. Is worse off really a possibility?

The key to accomplishing a public education reform that works for everyone is to stop structuring it as a constantly changing reaction and accommodation to the latest dysfunction. Some of the following ideas should hopefully give you an idea of what I mean. I would also ask you to think of your own assessment of what is wrong and ask yourself whether it too comes from structuring public education as a response to dysfunction instead of the straight shot no nonsense approach that addresses problems in a timely manner before they are allowed to create chaos:

1. A hostile top/down LAUSD administration comes from the fact that most people get into administration as the exclusive upward mobility for teachers, which tends to put them in an adversarial relationship with people whose cooperation they need, but are perceived as having abandon. Have you ever noticed that when you ask an administrator to do something they always figure out a way to make work for you? So most teachers don't ask.2. Ex-teacher administrators do not have the business and legal skills in addition to their educational skills to effectively run a multi-million dollar business in an efficient manner.3. The driving engine of public education is the Average Daily Attendance money from the state that pays the bills. The exclusive measure of whether the state pays is physical presence and not whether the student behaves or ever gets educated. This creates a wedge between teachers who have to try and teach students who are more often than not years behind grade level and disruptive of classes that they find humiliating, because their low skill level makes them objectively incapable of being engaged - something your administrator doesn't want to know anything about, "What's the matter, can't you control your class?" No, can you? The best an administrator will do is send you to a classroom management seminar where they will tell you that it is the failure of administration to insure discipline that make a teacher's job impossible.

Now it's your turn. Post a factor of present public education that accommodates to dysfunction or tell me why you disagree with my analysis.